`Quiet Genius' With Soul Of A Comedian

June 09, 2000|By Rick Kogan, Tribune Staff Writer.

In person or in print, Jeff MacNelly was a hard man to miss.

With his broad-shouldered 6 feet 4 inches underneath a thick head of prematurely gray hair, he cut a commanding physical presence. With his editorial cartoons and his comic strip, "Shoe," he packed a rare one-two punch that managed to provoke and delight millions of newspaper readers and more than a few politicians.

MacNelly, 52, winner of many awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoons, died early Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he had been admitted last Friday for emergency surgery. He had been treated for lymphoma as an outpatient at the hospital since late last year.

"Jeff was simply the most brilliant political cartoonist of the time," said Howard A. Tyner, editor of the Chicago Tribune. "No one had an eye and a sense of humor like his. And he was as funny personally as he was in print."

"The world has lost a quiet genius," humorist Dave Barry said of his close friend. MacNelly drew illustrations for Barry's syndicated column. "He was a hell of an artist ... a guy who had zero pretentiousness, a guy who never drew attention to himself except to make fun of himself, a guy who could have run with the media elite, but was much happier having a beer with his plumber."

"Every cartoonist was his friend," said Dick Locher, who draws "Dick Tracy" and is a retired Tribune editorial cartoonist. "We worked side by side for 20 years and laughed like crazy together; everything was funny."

MacNelly was born in New York City in 1947 and raised in an affluent part of Long Island. As a child, he was always drawing, a pastime his mother, Ruth, encouraged. He was profoundly influenced by his father, Clarence "Bud," an advertising executive and later the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post before he retired to become a professional portrait painter.

His father was a staunch Republican who served briefly on the staff of 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, giving MacNelly a politically conservative streak that marked his life and his work.

"I am a conservative," he once told a reporter, "but like to think I can call them as I see them. ... I don't make a conscious effort to infuse my work with any particular philosophy."

MacNelly had what he often called an "undistinguished academic career." He graduated from Phillips Academy, the prestigious prep school in Andover, Mass., and attended the University of North Carolina, where he occasionally submitted cartoons to the student paper, the Daily Tar Heel.

In 1969, while in the middle of his senior year, he dropped out of college and took a $120-a-week job as a cartoonist for a weekly newspaper in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The next year, married to his first wife, Rita, he applied for a job with her hometown paper, the Richmond News Leader in Virginia.

Sixteen months after joining the News Leader, the 24-year-old MacNelly was awarded the first of his three Pulitzers. (The others would come in 1978 and 1985.)

His drawings were elaborate, with fine lines and, as Newsweek magazine said in a 1980 profile of MacNelly, "a goofy gracefulness." He was quick with the pen, "as fast as lightning," said a former newspaper colleague, and precise with his aim. His philosophy was deceptively simple: "You hammer at what outrages you that day."

Because the majority of political cartoonists were deemed liberal, his conservative politics made his work attractive to the many newspapers that carried his syndicated work. Still, it was ultimately the stylishness of his drawing, the agility of his mind and the spark of his humor that made him a success.

Former Washington Post editor Howard Simons put it this way: "[MacNelly] is a stand-up comedian [who] has sat down in ink."

The Tribune began running his syndicated editorial cartoons twice weekly in 1971 on what was then called the Perspective Page.

In 1977, he began the comic strip "Shoe," which featured wisecracking anthropomorphic birds who worked at a newspaper called the Treetops Tattler. The strip's star, inspired by former boss and now UNC professor and friend Jim Shumaker, was P. Martin Shoemaker, a cigar-chomping, tennis shoe-wearing bird who edits the paper.

It was a hit, with its mix of wry humor, gentle cynicism and often ludicrous behavior. At the time of MacNelly's death, the strip was among the most popular in the country, running in almost 1,000 newspapers. It was twice the recipient of the Reuben award, the highest honor of the National Cartoonist Society.

Saying he wanted to devote more time to his beguiling comic strip, MacNelly in 1981 announced he was giving up editorial cartooning.

But a Tribune editor lured him out of this retirement, and he was hired by the paper in March 1982. He said he was returning to the editorial pages because he missed the daily stimulation of the news business.

"When it comes to humor," he said at the time, "there's no substitute for reality and politicians."